Microsoft has been adding AI services to personal, business and education customers for a little over a year now. Today the company confirmed that it has launched another creative AI service for a branch of the US government for the first time.

Bloomberg This new AI service, which currently has no real public name, is reported to be made for use by US intelligence organizations such as the CIA. It actually launched last week but was only officially announced today.

Bloomberg quoted William Chappell, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for strategic and technology missions, as saying:

This is the first time we’ve ever had an isolated version – where isolated means it’s not connected to the internet – and it’s on a special network only accessible by the US government.

Chappell added that this new AI service, based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM, can read data but cannot learn from it, in addition to the service being disconnected from data on the Internet. This should prevent any classified information from being leaked.

While the new AI spying service from Microsoft is currently live, it will still need to be tested and approved by US intelligence groups. No word yet on how long this testing period will take. There’s also no word on the price Microsoft plans to charge the government for this spying AI service.

In March, the US House of Representatives’ Office of Cybersecurity banned the use of Microsoft’s generative artificial intelligence assistant by its staff members. The US House said there is a “risk to users due to the threat of leaking House data to cloud services not approved by the House”.

Microsoft announced plans back in November 2023 to launch a version of Copilot for government work sometime in the summer of 2024. Since then, the company has only said it still plans to launch the government-based Copilot service sometime later in 2024.